SmashingConf San Francisco 2017: Somethin’ Is Cookin’ In The Kitchen!

Imagine a cloudy, rainy November evening. After a long day, you walk home along the streets, following the dimmed street lamps. Everybody seems to be busy, rushing somewhere, crossing paths with strangers and lonely stores. It’s dark and cold outside, and it’s difficult to see things through, so you decide to take a shortcut route to shorten the path.

Suddenly you see a bright light and music streaming from one of the remote corners of the street. Out of curiosity, you slowly walk towards the light, and hold your breath for a second. You discover a cozy little place with a fireplace, packed with people, jazzy tunes, and the smell of pizza, pasta and red wine. You see people smiling. Talking. Laughing. Sharing. Inviting you to join them.

1That’s right! Somethin’ is cookin’ in the kitchen!

You probably have a whole bunch of reasons to keep on walking down that street, but what if you walked inside instead? Well, that’s what joining the Smashing Conference experience feels like: It’s an intimate, personal, friendly experience for web designers and developers — in a cozy venue with charm and personality, with people who deeply care about the quality of their work. Don’t take our word — see for yourself2.

Guess what: we have SmashingConf San Francisco 20173 coming up in April next year, featuring tasty front-end ingredients, UX recipes and neat design beats from the hidden, remote corners of the web. 1 track, 2 conference days, 8 workshops, 16 excellent speakers and just 500 available tickets, taking place on April 4–5, 2017. And it’s going to be… smashing!

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We’ve put aside 50 early-bird tickets, and if you book a workshop6, too, you’ll save $100 off the conference and workshop price. That pretty smashing, isn’t it?

Also, in case you get a hard time taking a few days off, we’ve got your back: You can always use the Convince Your Boss PDF7 (0.1 Mb) to convince… well, whoever you have to convince! To the tickets.8

About The Conference

So you know what’s going on in front-end. You’ve been working with pattern libraries and atomic design and Gulp and SMCSS and BEM and HTTP/2 and Flexbox and SVG. What you might not know though is what pitfalls and traps other web designers have encountered in practice — to prevent issues creeping up on you later on.

With our conference in San Francisco9, we bring together experienced speakers to share practical front-end and UX techniques and pitfalls they ran into, lessons they’ve learned and the workflows they’ve chosen to stay efficient. Expect an intimate, hands-on conference experience, with lots of learning, sharing and networking along the way. Admittedly, we can’t solve every problem faced by the web community, but for front-end and UX, these conferences will push your boundaries significantly and give you answers you can take to the bank.

10SmashingConf SFO 201711 is a two-day event taking place in the very heart of San Francisco. If you’ve always wanted to visit the city, or just happen to live around the corner (well, more or less), this is just the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. (Image credit12)

We don’t care about trends, but we do care about smart solutions. We love exploring how designers and developers work and how actual problems are solved—ideas and techniques that actually worked, or failed in real-life projects, and why exactly they failed and what decisions were made instead. All those things that help us make smarter design decisions and build better products, faster.

That’s exactly what the conference will be about. No theory, no fluff, just curated quality content. 2 conference days, 1 track, hands-on workshops13 and 16 speakers14, taking place on April 4–5, 2017 in the beautiful and iconic Palace of Fine Arts. Of course, we embrace respect and tolerance with our code of conduct15.

Schedule Link

For this year’s line-up, we invited experts who have worked in small as well as large companies. People who spend day and night working and playing with web technologies. It doesn’t get more practical than that, does it? Get ready, set, go:

Tuesday, April 4th

Wednesday, April 5th Link

Smashing Workshops Link

Our workshops offer the opportunity to get to grips with new ideas and techniques in real depth, with a full day spent on the topic of your choice. It’s a great way to round off your conference experience, and we provide lunch, too. By registering for a workshop while buying your conference ticket, you’ll save $100 on the regular workshop ticket price.

Smashing Workshops on Monday, April 3rd, 2017 Link

Christian Holst on eCommerce Checkout Optimization3233

In this full day checkout optimization workshop Christian Holst, research director at the Baymard Institute, will share their newest checkout usability test findings, uncovered during the past 7 years of large-scale testing of e-commerce sites and from working with clients like Etsy, Office Depot, Sears, Kohl’s, Nike, John Lewis, Carnival, T-mobile, Overstock.com, The North Face, etc. Read more…34

Nathan Curtis on Scalable Design Systems3536

The role of design with large organizations is expanding, spreading across product teams and influencing decision-making at higher and higher levels. This scale makes it increasingly challenging to align designers and product teams to deliver cohesive, consistent experiences across a customer journey. Read more…37

Tim Kadlec on Real-Life HTTP/2 Today3839

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn front-end techniques and strategies you need to know today to make proper use of HTTP/2 tomorrow. The workshop will also look into dealing with legacy browsers that don’t support HTTP/2 as well as the security aspects of how you can keep your website or application safe, future-proof and blazingly fast. Read more…40

Vitaly Friedman on Smart UX Design Patterns4142

In this workshop, Vitaly Friedman (editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine), will cover practical techniques, clever tricks and useful strategies you need to be aware of when working on responsive websites. From responsive modules co clever navigation patterns and web form design techniques; the workshop will provide you with everything you need to know today to start designing better responsive experiences tomorrow. Read more…43

Smashing Workshops on Thursday, April 6th, 2017 Link

Sarah Drasner on Advanced SVG Animation4445

In this full-day workshop, Sarah will teach you the basics of the SVG Animation development and the essentials needed to start using these techniques in production environments for animations both large and small. Read more…46

Rachel Andrew on Advanced CSS Layouts With Flexbox and CSS Grid4748

This workshop is designed for designers and developers who already have a good working knowledge of HTML and CSS. We will cover a range of CSS methods for achieving layout, from those you are safe to use right now even if you need to support older version of Internet Explorer through to things that while still classed as experimental, are likely to ship in browsers in the coming months. Read more…49

Nadieh Bremer on Creative Data Visualization Techniques5051

With so many tools available to visualize your data, it’s easy to get stuck in thinking about chart types, always just going for that bar or line chart, without truly thinking about effectiveness. In this workshop, Nadieh will teach you how you can take a more creative and practical approach to the design of data visualization. Read more…52

Vitaly Friedman on New Front-End Adventures in Responsive Design5354

In this full-day workshop, Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, will present practical techniques, clever tricks and useful strategies you need to be aware of when working on any responsive design project. Most techniques are borrowed from mid-size and large-scale real-life projects, such as large e-commerce projects, online magazines and Web applications. Read more…55

Why This Conference Could Be For You Link

Pretty much because of the value it will provide. We’ll explore how designers and developers work, design and build and how they approach problems strategically. Think of it as a playbook with handy rules of thumb for your next projects: it can’t get more practical than this. Learn:

Strategies for building fast responsive websites,

Clever techniques for better front end,

Rules of thumb for better transitions and animations,

Strategy to break out of the generic layouts,

Approaches for better visual/brand identity design,

Guidelines for building pattern libraries,

How to build accessible and future-proof UIs,

Mistakes and lessons learned from large projects,

How to apply psychology in design decisions,

How to improve conversion rates in eCommerce projects,

How to craft responsive HTML email for Gmail, Yahoo and common mail clients,

How to tackle complexity when building a delightful, responsive user experience,

…more practical takeaways from real-life projects.

Download “Convince Your Boss” PDF Link

So you need to convince your manager to send you to the SmashingConf? No worries, we’ve got your back! We prepared a neat Convince Your Boss (PDF)56 (0.15 Mb) that you can use to convince your colleagues, friends, neighbors and total strangers to join you or send you to the event. We know that you will not be disappointed. Still not good enough? Well, tweet us @smashingconf and we’ll help you out — we can be quite convincing, too, you know!

We do everything possible to keep ticket prices affordable for everyone, and we welcome sponsors to help us create a truly unique, unforgettable conference experience. And you can be a major part of it. We have some attractive and creative sponsorship packages for you, and we are also flexible and would love to adjust them to your needs. So if you’re interested, please email Mariona at mariona@smashingconf.com59 — we’d love for you to be involved!

See You In San Francisco! Link

We’d love you to come and join us. Walk in. Take a seat. We are looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco, and who knows, perhaps months later after the conference is over, you’ll look back at your workflow, at your projects and at this very post realizing that it wasn’t that off after all. Grab your ticket and see you there! 😉